21 January, 2015

Antigone 4



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19 January, 2015

Antigone 3

CREON. Lead me away, please;
I do not know which way I should bend my gaze…

EVERYTHING IS DUST…


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17 January, 2015

Antigone 2

HAEMON. Antigone, this is madness—!

ANTIGONE. [Very sharp] —I AM NOT MAD.
I AM THE ELDEST DAUGHTER OF OEDIPUS REX.
I AM THE DESCENDANT OF KINGS—
THAT IS NOT MADNESS—
THAT IS OBLIGATION.
You are the son of a tutor
You cannot understand—
You cannot know—
You cannot possibly—
And though I adore you
You are limited.

[Pause]

I’m sorry.

[Then]  You have not answered my question.


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15 January, 2015

Antigone 1

[The CHORUS looks to the horizon]

The sun has set.
The west is red.
The moon a narrow scythe.
Darkness infiltrates tomorrow.


This will not be an easy day…


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27 December, 2014

'I Hate Men'


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04 December, 2014

I Live-Tweeted #PeterPanLive

















































“The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.” ― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan #PeterPanLive
— Alexandra Silber (@alsilbs) December 5, 2014



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29 November, 2014

Ask Al: A Basic Intro to Scansion for The Perplexed

Will Shakes.
Dear Al,

 I am currently receiving training from my college-level conservatory about playing Shakespeare (as in opposed to reading Shakespeare--meaning I am taking an acting class rather than a literature class, just FYI). 

 Basically: HELP. There is a major logic leap our intructor is making between truly understanding how the poetry "works" and "owning it" theatrically. The words still just look like a sea of thees and thous.

Truly, Madly, Sincerely, 

 Perplexed

 *

 Dear Perplexed,

 Aha!
                         Forsooth!  
     Pray tell!
                                  Heck yes!

 Ya know, sometimes we get find ourselves in a class where the teacher assumes we know the basics. That stinks. (This has happened to me countless times as a student as well as in life, and that is why as a teacher, I always teach things that seem mind-numbingly obvious, but actually are not--How to Actually Read a Play, How to Rehearse, How to fill out your Tax forms, etc.)

 Reader: do not freak the eff out: I GOT YOU.
Chances are, if you graduated from high school, you've probably had one of Shakespeare's plays in your hot little hands at some point in time.
  • Ya know the one about the rich-horny-teen-couple-whose-parents-super-duper-hate-eachother?
  • Or the one about the camping trip with a double-date-gone-wrong? Plus psychedelic drugs. And fairies. And a donkey-man-person?
  • Or about the emo-collge-drop-out-ghost-hunter from Denmark who is faced with a moral dilemma. He's crazy, but harmless (because nothing says "un-threatening" like "visibly deranged."). Oh! and his uncle killed his father so he could be king. And bang his mom.
...Or something. 

Hell, if you were brave, you may even have cracked the spine open and, ya know, read a couple pages, sifting through those "thee"s and "thou"s like you were some kind of FBI codebreaker.

Ah Billy Shakes.
He was cool. 
Widely regarded as the greatest writer in the history of the English language. - Whatevs.
His collective works consisted of 38 plays and 154 sonnets. - Casual.
And he never even attended university. (Take that, guidance counselors everywhere!) - No bigs.
Plus he married a woman named Anne Hathaway. - Seriously.
And was the original purveyor of The Dick Joke. - For reals. 
He used big words. - Cool.
And he invented a gazillion words when there didn't seem to be enough. - Super cool.

But actually, once you figure out what the hell is going on, it's not only quite straightforward but it is readable; not to mention profoundly, bone-marrow-chillingly, genius. And reader, that is where we begin this lesson: let us assume that William Shakespeare was a Great Poet. That'll help prevent us from second-guessing him. Or, critically, ourselves.

So.
Just in case you've never had the absolute basics on poetry read on, anon...

 I give you: [drum roll]

 The 'Al Silbs' Shakespearience:
A Basic Guide to Scansion for The Perplexed.

 [::: balloon drop! :::]

 *

 Ahhhhhh, SCANSION.
So. What the hell is it?

 Definition:
SCANSION: Describing the rhythms of poetry by dividing the lines into feet, marking the locations of stressed and unstressed syllables, and counting the syllables.

Take note that we do so much writing nowadays on the internet, in which we are trying to convey our natural speaking styles. We are used to putting. periods. after. words. to indicate all those words have equal stress, or using italics or CAPS or bold to indicate stressed words. (I am guilty of loving this style myself).  We see this all the time in modern scripts, essays, blogs and even on television. Shakespeare's scripts are only unusual to our eyes today because he did not utilize these "Interpretive Reading For Dummies" method—instead he utilized audible cues and clues inside blank verse, placing his stresses in the rhythm and meter. 

 Let's define those.  

BLANK VERSE: unrhymed verse, especially the unrhymed 'iambic pentameter' most frequently used in English dramatic, epic, and reflective verse.

 
What we look for when we first scan a poem or piece of dramatic verse are two things:

     1.    RHYTHM: the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line. The rhythm of the line is the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables over the course of the line or passage. It may be regular or irregular, which usually conveys information about the speaker and their feelings or motivations.


     2.    METER: the number of feet in a line.



 Thus, when we describe the rhythm of a poem, we “scan” the poem and mark:
    •    the “stresses” indicated by a ( / )
    •    and absences of stress known as “un-stress” ( ^ )
Then, we suss out the meter by counting the number of feet. And what are poetic “feet?” Simply,
a foot is a group of syllables.
- The purpose of all of this is to try to determine the regularity and irregularities of the iambic pentamenter, because even though 'iambic pentamenter' (I'll explain exactly what this means in detail in the next post) is the standard poetic structure, it is designed to be "broken" (from slightly to hugely) for artistic and theatrically practical reasons. 



What you should do first:
  • Speak the line like a normal human person, pronouncing words as you normally would.
  • Mark your script to indicate which syllables are stressed and which are unstressed (this should be obvious: it is pronounced goodBYE and not GOODbye, right? Don't freak out).
  • The marks over the syllables in your script (in pencil please) should look like this:
    ^ = unstressed
    / = stressed
  • Try to determine what all of this indicates about the character's personality/emotional state.
It should look like this:

Things to keep in mind:

  • Remember to put a mark over every syllable. 
  • If you are having "trouble" with a line, go to proper names first and then any polysyllabic words and play around with pronunciation, see if you missed something.  
  • Keep in mind that by pronouncing a word differently, you may find different numbers of syllables in it, as in “diff-rent-ly” and “diff-er-ent-ly.” (I'll go into more detail about what is called elision and expansion in the next post). This is particularly true of proper names ("Hermia" can be "HER-mi-ah" or "HERM-ya"). 

 This is art not science so try not to have a stroke about it.

 Next up: Rhythm.



Poetry!
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16 November, 2014

The Sound of Music: NEVER FORGET.

Allow me to tell you about the one singular attended performance that I will never forget.



                            . . . ready . . . ?



                                                                   . . . really?


. . . Cuz I don't think you are.



[WARNING: I’m offering this answer in numerical points to prevent you from having a stroke whilst reading.]

PICTURE IT:

1. In Seventh grade.

I went along to a

2.  middle school production

of

3. The Sound of Music

at

4. Hillel Day School

because

5. my friend Shira (yes, really), 

from

6. ballet class

was playing

7. Max Detweiller…

And Five seconds after the curtain went up I realized the entire production was…

8.    …in Hebrew.

It was also happened to be

9. Groundhog Day.





 . . . Scene.



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22 October, 2014

The Cat

There are some things we just cannot explain.


It was now late October, and (despite the slow passing of each unbearable day), unseasonably warm for Michigan. The trees (which should have been mostly bare), were a glittering amber aglow in the humming street lights, made all the more lustrous by the deep cobalt blue of the sky behind them, like pieces in a velvet jewel box. There was a knowledge we could feel in our skin that the dew would be heavy in the morning.

Kent and I were on The Walk. Silent and solemn, we strolled hand-in-hand along the curves and reaches of Fairway Drive, taking in the oddness of warmth in the evening sky, the strange intensity of the colors, and an unshakeable feeling that something was happening. There was mystery in the air—we could feel it on our cheeks as the humid breezes lightly gusted. We could smell it like a spice, and could faintly taste in the back of our throats. Uncertainty hung.  And we were alone.

    —I am going to openly admit here that I do not, nor have I ever possessed a particular faith. Prior to that evening, I had never given significant thought to, what we’ll just call, the world beyond—

Kent and I walked on, blanketing ourselves from the evening. Without discussing it Kent began to sing—quiet and low, light but solid. His voice was distinctive, it cut through the dark as I linked on to the song, my own voice dancing on top and then below, weaving in he harmony that was our specialty.

—Things I did have in place:
I believed everything happened for a reason.
I believed that forces, invisible and unnamable were at work in the universe.
I knew that my mother was raised Catholic, my father’s family supper-club Jews (which I supposed made me a “Cashew”??) raised in a largely secular home.
I had gone to Jewish pre-school (and kindergarten!)
I had played Golde in Fiddler on the Roof in High School and was deeply excellent.
I had read Macbeth, and I knew not to fuck with the ouija board—

All at once there was a gust so strong I buried my face in Kent’s chest. He wrapped his arms around me, hands clutching along my back, his own face shielded from the wind within the mass of my hair.


—I believed in good and evil.
I accepted that good and evil was just how the world worked.
I was afraid of unknowns.
There was no one to pray to, there was no structured religion to comfort me, but an inner self-reliant religion of the spirit—

When we looked up, there it was, plain as day.
The cat before us was a silent ginger thing: collarless, and almost impossibly orange with white markings on his face, paws, and a bright white front as if he were wearing a formal dress shirt. He—for you could just sense that it was a he—sat looking upward, paws together, his tail curled perfectly around his feet. One could not deny—no matter how many times you blinked or shook your head—that he was smiling.

Kent and I stared in silence. We looked at the cat. Then at one another. Is this happening? our expressions whispered. My heart twisted in my chest thrusting blood through my entire body but not, for whatever reason, to my brain, which still could not fully comprehend the nature of the creature before us.

Kent crouched down and reached his hand out toward the cat. Psssst psst pssssst, he cooed, rubbing his fingers together, beckoning. The cat walked in a grand circle, making the dramatic entrance of a great actor perfectly catching his light, and approaching, he nuzzled lovingly into Kent’s outstretched hand. Kent smiled. He nuzzled back, scratching under his ginger jowls much to both of their pleasures.

Soon the cat caught my eye and stopped. What? No nuzzling from you? his expression said. I hesitated, but leaned down and stroked the cat along the length of his back. He responded differently to my touch, twisting thoughtfully and placing his head in the crook of my elbow, as if he were doing so with great, overwhelming feeling. It was so intense a gesture that it startled me. I stood, and seemingly having satisfied the cat's needs, quickly backed away and turned toward home. My feet carried me swiftly, practically running from the encounter, Kent rushed up behind me, taking my hand as we moved through the darkness. 

All at once Kent’s clutch grew tight. He stopped dead in his tracks. “Al…” he whispered looking beyond my shoulder. I turned.

It was the cat.
—In the same smiling, perfect position.
It was following us home.

We opened the door to 1367, eyes locked on the cat. He hesitated only a moment before walking inside.
    “What's going on?” said Mom, sensing something as she came upstairs to the foyer. Catching sight of the cat she stopped dead.
    “Who is this?” she asked.
As if she knew what we all knew.
We all knew.

We made way for the cat—the very real, tangible cat—as he slowly surveyed the entire house, placing his paw contemplatively upon the walls, nuzzling up against the corners, soaking the place in with his oddly human eyes. He thundered downstairs in a too-familiar tempo, then thundered upstairs to peak into the office, the bathroom, my bedroom. Finally, he stood before the entrance of the master bedroom. He stared inward through the door left ajar; absolutely still, not breathing, not twitching, frozen in a kind of resolve.

He entered.
He jumped up onto the bed of Death, circled the side that days ago had been Michael’s, and settled into the spot, head down, eyes closed.
The three of us had followed the cat throughout his house tour—down and up the stairs, and now we lingered in the doorway, agape.
No one made a sound.

    “...Mike?” Kent said—it was as if the word fell out of his mouth without the will of the speaker. But the cat opened his eyes, lifted his head, and stared directly at me.

Suddenly he bolted beneath the bed, struggled with an invisible adversary, screeching, mewing, and without any warning, thundered down the stairs and out the still-open front door, never to be heard from again. Like a comet, one moment vivid and dazzling, the next vanished; away on its own journey through the endless dark unknown.

But these things happen.
They do.
Happen.


*


Nights later, I dreamed: Dad was back, and no one thought it was peculiar or remarkable but me.  I made my way downstairs and a particularly well-fed, healthy-looking Dad was leaving the shower in his favorite green velour bathrobe. I did a double-take, stopping him on the landing with sheer joy.

    “Dad,” I cried, “Oh Dad, you’re back!”
    “Hi Al” he said, smiling hugely, neither confirming nor denying my previous statement, "It's good to see you."
    “Oh yes…” I cannot stare at him hard enough, cannot suck in enough of his smell which is so pungent, and real tears fill my eyes, “Papa, we've all missed you.”
He nodded, and with only the slightest tinge of sadness he gathered his green robe close around him and moved to make his way up the stairs.
    “Wait! Dad!” I said, “The cat.”
I had to know.
He smiled.
    “The cat, Papa. Was—was that…?”

Dad came down a few steps and got as close to me as I could sense he was "allowed."
He laughed a little,
    “Of course” he said, eyes sparkling, “but you knew that" 
I nodded.
    “I knew you’d be afraid of a ghost or an angel, anything like that. I knew you would need to know that you had seen it, touched it.  And I just had to make certain everything was okay.” He  turned to go again.
    “Wait—Papa!” I cried, not wanting him to go just yet, “Please. What’s it like?”
    “Al…” he sighed, “you know I can't answer that.”
I nodded again.

He turned to go again, but stopped himself.  Then, looking down at me looking up to him doused in the soft, warm glow of my dreams he said,
    “It’s everything you hope it is...”

I woke in tears.
Comforted.
Certain of nothing.
Certain only, that we know nothing about the world beyond.


...So why not believe?
    Why not?

Because it happens.
These things do.
Happen. 




  

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19 October, 2014

Self Portrait: 19.OCT.14


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10 October, 2014

THIS IS NOT A DRILL

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17 September, 2014

Ask Al: Just Ask.

Dear Al,

I have a quick professional question. As you know after the New York Showcase I connected with a great manager. We seem to be working loosely together — I'd say he is more "mentoring and helping" me with the transition rather than me being a traditional client. 

I am wondering if it is okay to ask his help with being seen for a specific production? I have every intention for going to the EPA [Actor's Equity open audition], but should I still ask? I am more than anything afraid to step on his toes- more out of ignorance than anything else.

All the best and Thank you,

M

*

Girl I hear you!

These first few years after graduation can be super awkward in regards to how one talks to their representation, etc. Don't feel the need to be overly formal or cautious.
Just ask. Most people are nice, relatively not-crazy people who want to help (unless they truly can't, or are truly BURIED in work—which happens).

I realize it is scary. It is new. You have to get used to adult life where people don't cater to your needs in the same ways they do in college. But with absolutely zero effort you have the power of choice: do you
A) unravel into a freak-out of nail-biting, high pitched crazy-lady screaming colossal-ness? 
or,
B) ...not.
For the most part (unless the request is outrageous) follow this "JUST ASK" format:
1. BE CASUAL BUT PROFESSIONAL
     "Hi Scott this is M" is great.
Versus say,
     "Scooooootty. DUDE, my MAAAAAN..."
Or,
     "Hello Mr. Berowitzensteinenberg this is Madame Michelle McGiver, BFA, of Weeblywoo, Iowandia, inquiring in regards to..."
Or whatever.

2. BE DIRECT
Basically—don't be SHY, and if you FEEL shy, fake it til you make it. You're an actress.

3. BE SPECIFIC
     "Hi, I'm calling about the tour of 101 Dalmatians: The Musical Extravaganza. I think I'm a good match for the project and was planning to go the EPA but if you could get me an appointment, that would be great. Let me know and thank you so much."
Bazinga!

4. BE BRIEF.
     "This is what I need help with—have a good one, okay bye!"
Done and done.

5. BE SANE.
If you don't get your way, just move on.
Don't take it personally. Don't go nuts. Don't quit the business or move to Guam.
In all of life, but particularly in a tough business, disappointments have to roll off like water off a duck's back.
Move on to the next project, goal-post, or dream.
It's out there for you.

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